Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

First of all, this was the last pull request where Jesse Barnes of Intel is handling the role as maintainer of the Linux PCI sub-system. Jesse has announced he’s handing off the PCI maintainer role to Bjorn Helgaas, a software engineer at Google. “He’s been a core PCI and Linux contributor for some time now, and has kindly volunteered to take over. I just don’t feel I have the time for PCI review and work that it deserves lately (I’ve taken on some other projects), and haven’t been as responsive lately as I’d like, so I approached Bjorn asking if he’d like to manage things. He’s going to give it a try, and I’m confident he’ll do at least as well as I have in keeping the tree managed, patches flowing, and keeping things stable.”

HP, which has a long history of developing and maintaining its own UNIX operating systems such as HP-UX and VMS, now sees Linux and Microsoft Windows gaining market share in the mission critical market. HP said it will commit code to the Linux kernel, working with Red Hat as its mission critical Linux distribution, and added that it wants to work with the open source community rather than just do its own thing.

Graphics Stack

About eight hours after the introduction of the GeForce GTX 680, rudimentary support for this NVIDIA graphics card has been added to the Nouveau DRM/KMS driver in the Linux main development branch. At the beginning of the week, the developers began to prepare this branch for Linux kernel version 3.4, the release of which is expected at the end of May. With version 3.4, Nouveau will also cease to be rated as a staging driver.

AMD said it will complement its closed source Catalyst drivers with open source versions for Linux users. Although the firm’s open source efforts lag considerably behind its Catalyst drivers, AMD’s Alex Deucher announced that the firm’s latest open source driver release supports its Southern Islands GPUs found in Radeon HD 7000 series graphics cards.

Applications

We dance around the topic of what the Linux desktop needs to succeed all the time, and usually it comes down to this argument: the Linux desktop needs to have a better design. That is the core thread of almost every argument I hear lately.

For example, it was the first topic listed by Canonical’s Jonathan Riddell, who (up until recently) was Canonical’s lead developer of Kubuntu, the company’s KDE-flavored release when he stepped through a list of answers to the question “So how can KDE remain relevant?”

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

We were contacted by Matthias Lee, owner of opentablets.org, a couple weeks back. Since then, they have put together forums for Vivaldi and have started posting news and information about our efforts.

I know some of you will ask “What about forums.kde.org?” Plasma Active forums and related KDE discussions will continue there, while opentablets.org will focus on our specific tablet (and other) future products. This is the beauty of open participation: everyone gets to add their own flavour.

We’re really excited about opentablets.org as it is one more piece of the community support and interaction puzzle being filled in by the community itself.

GNOME Desktop

I am not just another gnome 3 hater in the most fashionable and popular way. That’s, though I don’t like the way it defies the traditional workflow, the biggest problem for me, is something else. It’s the shoddy quality of the software, even after one year of its initial release.

Forget the usability, still the gripes are many, ranging from its integration into the system to how it talks with various other core components such as graphics, desktop effects, and the overall stability.

This was actually going to be a preview of SolusOS, both because I wanted to do it and because a commenter had requested it. Unfortunately, MultiSystem refused to write SolusOS to the USB, while SolusOS was unbootable after being written to the USB by UnetBootin. Hence, I could not try it out. Instead, I am trying out Cinnamon 1.4.

Red Hat Family

Oracle has announced that it is making supported versions of Oracle Database 11g Release 2 and Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g Release 1 (R1) available on Oracle Linux 6; currently, this is only for Oracle Linux 6 with the company’s Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel. Oracle Linux 6 is a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Oracle’s own kernel added.

Scientific Linux is an unknown gem, one of the best Red Hat Enterprise Linux clones. The name works against it because it’s not for scientists; rather it’s maintained by science organizations. Let’s kick the tires on the latest release and see what makes it special.

Phones

Android

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

It is planning to release two variants of its tablets in the country. While one variant will be running on Android 2.2, the other variant will have Linux Sugar OS on-board. The Linux variant of the tablet will also have the native Hindi language support.

Akamai Chief Product Architect Guy Podjarny has announced that the company’s Mobitest tool is now available as open source. Mobitest is a testing agent for benchmarking the performance of mobile web pages, originally created by Blaze. Blaze was acquired by the Massachusetts-based content delivery network and cloud services provider in February of this year.

HP says that instead of selling its webOS mobile system or killing it off, it’s making it available as open-source software that anyone can use and modify freely. The company is hoping more mobile apps will be developed under webOS by offering it to the open-source community.

Open source software is available for free, along with its source code, and it has developed its own substantial following since the early days of computing. The best known implementations are in infrastructure areas, with the well-known Linux, Java, and PHP packages. Recently, it has gained added attention due to its central role in cloud IT, and through the growing Linux-based Android ecosystem. There are many open source programs available, and there is major support from companies such as IBM and Red Hat. Well known applications include the Mozilla web browser, LibreOffice, Pentaho, WordPress, Moodle, Drupal, and SugarCRM ; but these are just the tip of the iceberg.

A decade ago most enterprises avoided Open Source software, but things have changed. Right now Open Source use at enterprises stands at higher than 75 percent, and Gartner predicts that in just five years that 99 percent of enterprises will have adopted some amount of Open Source software. So rather than Open Source being considered as a marginalized alternative to commercial software, Open Source is increasingly becoming the mainstream option.

Users are taking control, and there’s no stopping them from bringing their own network-connected devices to the office. Today, every phone, every e-book reader, every tablet is a gateway to a world of networked computing. Even if you tried to prevent your employees from bringing them into the building, only military-grade security could stop them.

The BYOD (bring your own device) trend is variously viewed as “a world of pain for IT,” a security challenge that’s solvable, and something to be tolerated with grim resignation. And there’s a growing industry of companies who want to help you stop it, cripple it, or control it.

Events

One of my favorite projects I have the good fortune to be contributing to was created by the US Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate (that’s DHS S&T in Beltway lingo, the equivalent of the R&D arm of the agency for the rest of us mere mortals) It’s called the HOST program (Homeland Open Security Technology).

Web Browsers

Like many people, I’ve been tracking the steady ascent of Google Chrome – and corresponding decline of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer – for some time now. Just recently, yet another milestone has been reached, apparently:

Google’s Chrome narrowly became the world’s top internet browser for the first time on Sunday 18 March 2012, according to StatCounter, the independent website analytics company.

As the accompanying graph indicates, there are some very interesting patterns to be observed.

Mozilla

Mozilla has announced the arrival of the latest development version of Firefox 13 in the Aurora channel. This in-development version will arrive as the production version of Firefox in approximately twelve weeks. The development version includes a redesigned home page, changed “new tab” behaviour, and auto-completion in the browser address bar.

SaaS/Big Data

Software features are good, but certification that they actually work is even better — particularly in the open source channel, where users don’t always enjoy the same kind of warranties that are common in the proprietary ecosystem. In this respect, the world of open source Big Data management became a little more stable with the recent announcement that MapR’s distribution of Apache Hadoop has been certified for Talend Open Studio for Big Data. Here’s the scoop.

CMS

Open source is a fantastic element of the software ecosystem and recent studies have shown that it’s on par with traditional proprietary software. Drupal is one of the ring leaders in the open source movement by providing expansive, yet simple tools for Web site content management systems. It’s even so popular that it’s used for the White House’s Web site.

Business

Free and open source software has touched all our lives whether we know it or not. Often misunderstood and treated with suspicion, many businesses take advantage of the benefits of it without acknowledging the community that powers it.

Before going any further, free software is not about price, rather an ideology that advocates that software has most utility when there are no barriers to its ability to be used, improved and studied at the source code level.

Semi-Open Source

Funding

The Linux Foundation has received the most revenue amongst all of the free software and open source non-profits and directly pays its leader the most, but the highest compensation of any sort is still being received by Mozilla Foundation Chair Mitchell Baker, along with her CTO Colleague Brendan Etch.

The glibc developers have announced the release of version 2.15 of the GNU C Library. The new version fixes a significant number of bugs and adds two new Linux interfaces (process_vm_readv and process_vm_writev). The biggest improvements come in the area of optimisation, however, with many operations being improved throughout the code. This release also adds four new locales, including support for the Native American Unami language, which, according to Wikipedia, is extinct.

Openness/Sharing

While using a touchscreen to game isn’t a problem for most people, there are still gamers out there who can’t stand the thought of playing games without an actual gamepad. Well, unfortunately there aren’t a lot of options out there for such purposes. This is where The Evolution Team’s DRONE comes in. Called an open source Bluetooth controller, it is a gamepad designed to work with your smartphones and tablets.

In this guest post, Frank Tobe, a robotics analyst and publisher of The Robot Report, describes a recent debate between two prominent robotics executives and their opposing views on how to nurture profitable robotics businesses.

I frequently get asked why I spend so much time talking about the entertainment industry here on Techdirt, and one of the points I make is that I think what’s happened to the entertainment industry over the last decade and a half is really a leading indicator of the type of disruptive change that has already started to impact, or will soon be impacting, nearly every industry imaginable. As such, by understanding what’s happening and how not to respond, perhaps we can help lots of other industries move more smoothly into the future. So I’m always interested and intrigued by parallels in totally unexpected industries. Just recently, the good folks over at NPR’s Planet Money put together a fascinating episode about modern farm economics (and host Adam Davidson also wrote a NY Times piece on the same subject). While it mainly focuses on Claudia, the high-tech cow, it also has some key economic points that will likely sound familiar to regular readers (unfortunately, these key economic points are only in the audio version of the podcast, and were left out of the transcript).

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

In February, Common Cause wrote to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, asking for an explanation about an apparently unreported $1,350 gift from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in 2009. Cantor’s office immediately responded, claiming our inquiry was without foundation, but last week his office quietly amended his financial disclosures to include the gift from ALEC.

Copyrights

The first time I ever heard someone declare the death of copyright, it wasn’t a dreadlocked GNU/Linux hacker or a cyberpunk in mirror shades: it was a music executive, circa 1999, responding to the launch of Napster.

I thought he was wrong then and I think he’s wrong now — as is everyone else who’s declared copyright to be dead.

The problem is in the name: copyright. The Statute of Anne and other early copyright rules concerned themselves with verbatim copying because copying was the only industrial activity associated with creative expression at the time. There were lots of crafts associated with culture, of course, – performing music, plays and dance, painting pictures, and so on – but these weren’t industrial activities.

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The lunacy of the EPO with its patent maximalism will likely go unchecked (and uncorrected) if Battistelli gets his way and turns the EPO into another SIPO (Croatian in the human rights sense and Chinese in the quality sense)

Another long installment in a multi-part series about UPC at times of post-truth Battistelli-led EPO, which pays the media to repeat the lies and pretend that the UPC is inevitable so as to compel politicians to welcome it regardless of desirability and practicability

Implementing yet more of his terrible ideas and so-called 'reforms', Battistelli seems to be racing to the bottom of everything (patent quality, staff experience, labour rights, working conditions, access to justice etc.)

"Good for trolls" is a good way to sum up the Unitary Patent, which would give litigators plenty of business (defendants and plaintiffs, plus commissions on high claims of damages) if it ever became a reality

Microsoft's continued fascination with and participation in the effort to undermine Alice so as to make software patents, which the company uses to blackmail GNU/Linux vendors, widely acceptable and applicable again